To me I don’t think it’s too late to buy bitcoin, simply because bitcoin is not yet at it ath yet. So someone can still buy an affordable bitcoin as it is.
ATH meaning all time high is a characteristics of the highest price points Bitcoin has achieved which is around $109k and it has nothing to do with your purchasing power since you can buy a fraction of it and not a whole Bitcoin making it much affordable especially with the idea and concept of DCA strategy that's is being talked about either weekly or monthly within your discretionary income. That is to say Bitcoin is still affordable to buy even at any given ATH because you are not buying the a whole Bitcoin, Bitcoin has already made several ATH But yet people are still buying.
If we are new to bitcoin and we are planning to invest into bitcoin rather than trying to trade it, then it can take us a decently long time to build up our bitcoin position, which also depends on the newbies financial situation and
his personal factors.
An overwhelming majority of normies are not necessarily in a position to lump sum into their bitcoin position or to front load it, and surely there can be some benefits in regards to front loading and/or lump summing into bitcoin, yet even those strategies are probably not as good as someone who is also able to supplement his building of his BTC position with ongoing buying, through 4-10 years or more, depending on his finances.
Even though we might have guys who would prefer to front their bitcoin however it seems to me that probably few or little to none of us here might be able to front our bitcoin portfolio, most of the guys here are more of DCA folks including me and probably you too JJG i guess.
We should not presume the financial status of any guys.
I talk about all three forms of accumulating bitcoin because each of them can be effective under certain circumstances, and a brand new person could either have money the is available (beyond his normal income stream) that he can put into bitcoin, and other times, guys can come across exrtra cash (like receiving an inheritance, getting a surprise work bonus, selling some kind of property, winning the lottery or some other way that he might get some extra money). There are other guys who come to bitcoin and they are not brand new to investing, so they may have other resources upon which they can draw in order to increase their bitcoin investment in a more rapid way than other people who had not already been investing.
I will agree with your assumption that an overwhelming majority of people are not able to front load their investment right away, yet they can still come upon cash that they can invest.
Another thing that I have mentioned several times and in several posts, when I came to bitcoin in late 2013, I had already been investing in various kinds of assets for more than 20 years, and so I came to bitcoin with abilities to front load my investment, yet I still customized my entrance into bitcoin to my own personal circumstances which was that I gave myself a 6 months budget and I divided it into 26 parts (for each of the 26 weeks), and right before the 6 months had expired, I extended my 6 month budget for another 6 months by giving myself a similarly sized budget, so over the first year that I was in bitcoin from late 2013 to late 2014, I front loaded my investing using a DCA approach, but the amounts that I was investing was higher than my normal income because I was attempting to engage in a front loading of my investment. At the end of 2014, I thought that I had pretty much accumulated enough BTC, since at that time, I had recalculated all of my matters and I considered that I had put around 10% of my quasi-liquid investment portfolio into bitcoin, so I largely figured that I had enough BTC, yet since the BTC prices stayed very low throughout 2015 (in the $200s most of the time), I continued to accumulate bitcoin during that 2015, and figured that I had gotten to a state of overaccumulation by 3.5%-ish , since my BTC portion of my quasi-liquid investment portfolio had gotten to 13.5 %-ish.
After the end of 2015, the BTC price pretty much shot up and then ended up going up largely around 78x between mid-2015 and late 2017 (going to $19,666)... and then of course in 2018 the BTC price corrected back down into the sub $10k territories and had a couple of periods of going below $6k and as low as $3,124, yet still going as low as $3,124 was still more than 12x higher than it had been for most of 2015. So the way that a person accumulates bitcoin can surely end up affecting how he attempts to deal with his BTC holdings and how to manage his holdings.
Part of the reason that many of us talk so much about DCA is because there are so many folks (an overwhelming majority) who are not in the practice of saving, and they do not have lump sums available to them, yet it would be short-sighted to act as if everyone was in the same boat, even though DCA still works for people who might be trying to front load their BTC investment as I thought that I was mostly trying to do in 2014 with my own investment into bitcoin. So my frontloading of my investment into bitcoin still involved DCA, yet mostly compressed into two separate periods of 26 weeks, and I was not even really sure where I was going with my bitcoin investment, since I had already authorized myself the money, but I also made sure that I was trying to study and to learn more about bitcoin while I was investing into it.. and I was largely thinking that my investment into bitcoin would be at least 1-2 years, but I was also not sure, and I was also open to longer periods, but I was not really able to know how long i was thinking that I would stay in bitcoin. I had tentatively set some potential goals that were even further out, yet BTC's price moves and my learning about it ended up affecting the way that I thought about bitcoin and changed the way that I also talked about it.. including my own adjusted consideration that bitcoin's investment thesis was getting stronger and stronger with the passage of time, whereby I started to recommend that newbies to bitcoin consider investing into bitcoin 4-10 years or longer.
personally i love idea of front loading as it surely will reduce the stress of buying every now and then but again the capacity to purchase a bigger fraction of bitcoin is even more difficult but when guys buy consistently with their discretionary income it leaves them with little or no stress and even achieve buying at a cheaper price when bitcoin dips even its vice versa.
There is nothing wrong with front loading your bitcoin investment when you have such an option, yet guys still might make various choices regarding the ways that they buy (whether DCA, Lump sum and/or buying on dips) even when they have the option to front load their bitcoin investment.